Idioms taken literally, sentence 7

"Beat about the bush" means avoid saying something directly; it comes from hunters beating bushes to scare birds out.

Who acts: origin · What happens: beat, mean, avoid, say, come, scare out · To what, where: something, hunters, bushes, birds · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of the lesson «Idioms taken literally» of the language course of Mova's primary school. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (origin), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

The tree

The words, one row each (CoNLL-U)

#	word	lemma	UPOS	features	head	relation
1	"	"	PUNCT	_	2 Beat	punct
2	Beat	beat	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	7 means	nsubj
3	about	about	ADP	_	5 bush	case
4	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	5 bush	det
5	bush	bush	NOUN	Number=Sing	2 Beat	obl
6	"	"	PUNCT	_	2 Beat	punct
7	means	mean	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	root	root
8	avoid	avoid	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	7 means	ccomp
9	saying	say	VERB	Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part	8 avoid	xcomp
10	something	something	PRON	Number=Sing PronType=Ind	9 saying	obj
11	directly	directly	ADV	_	9 saying	advmod
12	;	;	PUNCT	_	14 comes	punct
13	it	it	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	14 comes	nsubj
14	comes	come	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	7 means	parataxis
15	from	from	ADP	_	16 hunters	case
16	hunters	hunter	NOUN	Number=Plur	14 comes	obl
17	beating	beat	VERB	Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part	14 comes	advcl
18	bushes	bush	NOUN	Number=Plur	17 beating	obj
19	to	to	PART	_	20 scare	mark
20	scare	scare	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	17 beating	advcl
21	birds	bird	NOUN	Number=Plur	20 scare	obj
22	out	out	ADP	_	20 scare	compound:prt
23	.	.	PUNCT	_	7 means	punct

Pragmatics

form: statement
act: assert
voice: narrator
polarity: none
teacher: changed form=decl, act=assert, voice=narrator

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	where	other	roles by
1	beat in a quote	infinitive				about the bush	vn sound_emission-43.2 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Theme about bush=Location
2	mean	present					vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic
3	avoid	infinitive					vn avoid-52 «NP V S_ING»: agent=Agent clause=Theme
4	say speech: assert	gerund		something		directly property	vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V NP.topic»: agent=Agent something=Topic
5	come	present	origin		hunters		vn escape-51.1-1 «NP V PP.initial_location»: agent=Theme from hunter=Initial_Location
6	beat	gerund	origin not said here	bushes			vn sound_emission-43.2 «PP.location V NP»: agent=Location bush=Theme
7	scare out	to-infinitive	origin not said here	birds			vn amuse-31.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Stimulus bird=Experiencer

One row per clause the reader finds. «not said here»: a role filled from the clause above. «roles by»: a VerbNet class and frame when one fits the verb, else the reader's rules on the tree.

Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0, as the whole of Mova corpus 0.4, of which this treebank (the agreed school, mova-school-agreed-en.conllu) is part. The lessons were written for Mova's primary school. Sentence school:language:025-idioms-taken-literally.lesson:7.

The tree: Mova annot: Rust (en) → Haiku 5.5 (medium, Batches API) patches; gates UD 2.18; agreed by treeagree rules (Stanza, Trankit, spaCy trf): R5-strong ×1, R6-punct-agree ×1, R7-rel-agree ×1. The frames are read from the tree by Mova's frames reader (prag) when this page is built, the lesson read in order, so a pronoun may be resolved from an earlier sentence.

See the release 0.4.

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/25-idioms-taken-literally/7/